Solar System Coloring Pages

How to use these pages

There are eight planets in our solar system. In order from the Sun they are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A sentence helps you remember the order: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos”, where each word starts with the same letter as a planet. Pluto was called the ninth planet until 2006, when astronomers at the International Astronomical Union named it a dwarf planet, so it is not on these pages as a planet.

Each planet page is drawn to show what makes that planet different: Saturn’s wide rings with the dark gap in them, Jupiter’s stripes and its Great Red Spot, Earth’s oceans and continents, the ice caps and giant canyon on Mars, and Uranus tipped over on its side. On the whole solar system page the planets are not to scale: if the Sun were as big as a beach ball, Earth would be the size of a peppercorn about 65 metres away.

Real planet colours make good colouring guides: grey Mercury, pale yellow Venus, blue and green Earth, rusty red Mars, tan and orange Jupiter, gold Saturn, pale blue-green Uranus and deep blue Neptune. The three worksheets check what children have learned, and each PDF has an answer key on page 2.